Mr. Katz, in addition to being a basketball team owner, is also extremely sensitive. Someone snapped a picture of his tongue all funny. Yeah, it’s kinda chuckle worthy, but not worth the time tweeting to my friends. Except that when the picture was used as an illustration for a blog post critical of him, he accused the blog of being “defamatory” and asked the courts to shut down the blog. Not suppress the picture (which would be bad enough), but to shut down the blog. And not just shut it down, but to shut it down in a preliminary injunction. For those of you who don’t speak Legalese (like me), that means he wanted the blog shut down before the lawsuit even went to real trial.

Over-react much?

Katz’s position is essentially that anyone who is mean should be legally required to shut up. Also, he has money, so he can afford to sue.

I try not to use the only words that come to mind when I try to describe how I feel about this individual.

The purpose of this post is two-fold. 1) Spread the picture. Because it’s NOT defamation and if it’s so embarrassing that Mr. Katz forgets what country he lives in then he needs to be reminded. Streisand effect, baby. Now that he’s tried to shut people up, it’s time to shout him down. If he’d not said anything, neither would have I. In fact, I may have even been critical (not heavily, and probably not enough to blog about it) of the original poster for being petty enough to choose that picture. But now that Mr. Katz brought the court in, he’s the enemy. So I’ll happily spread it.